Pathfinder divide tool creating a compound path instead?

[defaultw79fevifyzh3]

Hi,

I'm on 26.0.3 (also tried going back to 26.0). I've been using Illustrator for years and consider myself pretty savvy. The Pathfinder divide tool has always been a destructive tool creating entirely separate shapes, but today when I tried to use the Pathfinder divide or trim tool to make a donut by cutting a circle out of a bigger circle, Illustrator is creating some kind of masked compound path and hiding the cutout center circle instead of dividing into 2 shapes. So my quick actions in the propertires panel are all differnt and in this instance it's removing actions like "offset path" and instead showing a "release" button that undoes the mask hiding the cutout center. Is this a glitch, or a setting that got fudged or am I losing my mind? Help!

[Monika Gause]

Please show your artwork before and after. And please include the layers panel so we see the objects and their stacking order.